The present invention relates to a light guiding keypad and a light guiding keypad assembly. More particularly, the present invention relates to a light guiding keypad and light guiding keypad assembly which can reduce the number of components of a mobile phone by forming key character patterns on one surface of a light guiding plate of a mobile phone that receives lights through its side surface and thus making the light guiding plate perform as keypad.
As competitions in current mobile phone market get serious, some manufacturers are trying to find niche market where the other manufacturers do not focus, rather than consistently maintaining a market policy of pursuing high quality and high price products. As one of these trends, some manufacturers attempt to find a new breakthrough by producing low price mobile phones with implementation of only necessary functions rather than implementation of high quality functions.
Although these trends to produce such low price mobile phones are not considered, it is an outstanding issue in this field to achieve equal performance with minimum cost, components and time.
In order to meet customers' demand for slim mobile phones, mobile phone manufacturing industries has reduced thickness of mobile phones through development of thinner batteries than that of the early days of manufacturing mobile phones. However, means replacing conventional keypads in keypad assembly necessary for achieving performance of mobile phones has not been developed so that it has been considered that conventional keypad structure including keytop part and keybase part should be included in the keypad assembly.
In the mean time, various types of light sources have been used for illuminating key pad assembly of mobile phones and concept of using light guiding plates of transparent material has been introduced through the applicant's Korean utility model application No. 2007-14206 (Title: A printing type lighting guide sheet for light source) etc. to solve problems of the conventional light sources. However, no one in this field expects that the light guiding plate can replace the keypad.